Differential Equations
by nobleknightkaeru
Summary: Lucca considers the complexity of friendship compared to science/mathematics.


…I have no idea. I swear I started this with the intention of it actually having a plot, but that very quickly melted away. I doubt any of the metaphors really make sense. BUT I DON'T CARE. D:

…Please don't eat me.

(Sorry that the later half is especially halfassed. I was losing focus and knew I wouldn't ever finish it if I didn't complete it in one go.)

To Lucca, friendship had always been an anomaly. She was good at a lot of things—at building, at thinking, at designing. She could find logarithms with no effort at all, and name pi to the 30th decimal—and yet that simple idea of the definition of friendship eluded her. And it _bothered_ her.

Some of her friends were easy to understand, of course, at least on a basic level. She'd known Crono the longest, and trusted him the most—so she could say with moderate certainty and complete honesty that she believed that he did all that he did out of a simple goodness of his character. Ayla was another easy explanation for her—the valiant cavewoman made it obvious enough that strength and courage are the fundamentals of life, and she lived by it.

But the others—oh, the others. _They're_ the ones that boggled Lucca's scientific mind. With friends like Ayla, and Crono, she felt as if she could assign a consistent equation to them: A+B=C. In the situation where A and B happens, they'll probably do C.

But more elusive friends like Robo and Frog, or even the distant Magus, made assigning an "equation" difficult. She felt like more variables had to be added. In her mind, their equations would be anything but linear—oh, no, they would be _differential_: often unsolvable, near unpredictable, and full of mind-boggling infinites.

She certainly didn't hold one above the other; she respected Ayla just as much as Frog, for instance, and certainly held Crono in the highest regard. Simple didn't mean _bad_, and complex didn't mean _good_, or vice versa. Even so, though, the complexity gave her a new and interesting puzzle to work through.

Robo, for instance, she would have guessed would be the easiest to pin down. She repaired him, after all, time and time again—she knew how every one of his cogs and circuits functioned, how they intertwined, and how they made him function, on a mechanical level. And yet what she couldn't explain was his _personality_—robots aren't evil, she knows that. They're pure, uncorrupted vessels, with which the creator can do whatever they like with.

But even given that natural purity, Robo seemed to have something _more_; he wasn't just cogs and wires and bolts. He knew what happiness, sadness, and loss meant. He knows fear, and bravery, and loneliness. Nothing about his machinery, or his programming, explained that—he was built and programmed exactly like his RY-brothers, and yet acted so differently.

Lucca had often wondered if, perhaps, she'd accidentally crossed some wires in fixing him—but even that explanation did not resonate with her. If her encounter with Lavos had taught her anything, it was that much higher powers than humanity can exist, and that they can't always be controlled. Though it bothered her, she just had to let herself grapple with the idea that, perhaps, there _is_ no variable that can be attached to a being like Robo. It was something intangible—perhaps even _above_ science, _above_ mathematics. The idea seemed so impossible, and yet truthful at the same time.

Then there were people like Frog and Magus. She found them exceptionally ironic; outwardly, they seemed like irreconcilable opposites, and yet the more she learned about their veiled pasts, the more alike she found them to be. Both were victims of uncontrollable circumstance, and both knew the meaning of loss more than anyone should.

But what confused her the most, and what she had the hardest time attributing a variable to, perhaps, was that she wasn't sure the two truly hated each other. A+B=C—if one person does a bad (horrible, even) thing to another, if no form of apology takes place, then it's quite likely that they'll hate each other. And yet she wasn't sure that that was the case with Frog and Magus, despite all logic.

They grumbled at each other and put on a good show of it, of course. And if forced into close proximity, glares fired off more readily than lasers in 2400 A.D. Even given that, though, Lucca felt something intangible lurking beneath the surface—like an unspoken truce, that she felt yet couldn't quite define. They had been sworn enemies, on both a political and personal level, and yet that lingering sense of loss seemed to call for an unspoken ceasefire. Frog and Magus were sworn enemies, she could struggle to reason; but Glenn and Janus, on the other hand—they seemed like brothers in arms, connected by a shared loss of belonging.

How could completely conflicting ideas exist as one? She had no idea. She couldn't put a definition it; she could only accept it as true. She would never be able to think assign perfect, linear logic to it, or replicate it; but, thinking through it, she found that maybe, just maybe, that didn't bother her.


End file.
